


The Lonely, Lonely, So Fucking Lonely Journal Keeper

by Cheeto_Consumer



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Pining, Seven Birds - Freeform, Stolen Century fic, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 14:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17747903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cheeto_Consumer/pseuds/Cheeto_Consumer
Summary: The Stolen Century from Lucretia's perspective.





	The Lonely, Lonely, So Fucking Lonely Journal Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> I was re-listening to the Stolen Century and smoking a new hybrid strain and the idea for this fic just popped into my head! It’s very specific to that arc, obvy. I plan on getting pretty in-depth about the journey. This is part one of five. Enjoy and please please comment!

The first time you meet Lup is of course several weeks before the Starblaster’s launch date. You’ve been preparing for this mission for some time now, but Taako and Lup are relatively late additions to the crew--apparently some higher-ups had decided it was prudent to have a couple of arcanists on board--so Davenport introduces them to the rest of you, briefly and cordially. They appear friendly, if bored, and practically finish each other’s sentences. Lup shakes your hand, and her smile is warm, her body set perfectly at ease. You can never remember anything particularly significant about that first meeting, though you try many times.

At the press conference she makes a joke about getting back fifteen dollars from someone, which strikes you as odd until you remember that she’s a wizard--specifically, an evocation wizard--and everybody knows what type of person decides to be an evocation wizard. You’ve only spoken to her a few times, and you’ve yet to see her take anything seriously even once. The last time, she made a joke about how similar your names are.

“I hope nobody calls you, like, Lu for short, because that would get confusing,” she says. 

“No one ever has,” you assure her, finding a spark of amusement in the idea of anyone thinking of you as the type of person who would have a nickname.

The night before you are set to launch, everybody goes out to a bar. It goes against your usual instincts to go out to a bar with coworkers, especially the night before the most important mission you’ve ever been on. But you talk to your mom a couple hours before--she’s been worrying lately, and you’ve been spending extra time with her to compensate for the fact that you’re about to go away for 2 months. She says, “you’re going to have to live with these people, hon. You should get comfortable around them now.” 

It pains you to admit that for once your mother has a point. And you’re going to be recording everything they do on this journey, so you may as well get used to chronicling

So you go out to the bar, settle in next to the skeeball, and observe your crewmembers as closely as your razor sharp gaze and nimble hands will allow. Davenport and Barry get friendly with the bartender and order a lot of little fruity drinks. Your hands barely leave the page as a barfight breaks out around you, and Magnus steps in, fists readied, five beers deep. A half hour later he’s got a bandage wrapped around his hand from the splinter he got during the fight when he picked up a chair and broke it over a guy’s head. He has a cut over his eye steadily developing, and Merle’s dealing with a few scrapes and bruises as well.

Taako and Lup spend the whole night hustling people at pool. By the end of the night, they’ve managed to get three different victims to give up their shoes. You purposefully picked an out-of-the-way seat in the corner where you can see the bar but, through the crowd, the other patrons have a hard time seeing you. You’ve been there for some time, your back against the wall, when Lup sidles up to you. Though by this point it’s really more of a stagger than a sidle.

“My god, you write fast,” she observes, leaning against the wall next to you. You don’t know what to say to that, so you settle for “thank you,” just to be safe.

“You want a drink? You’ve been in this corner all night.” Her eyes are bright but she’s slurring her words, and you can’t tell if she’s being nice to you because she likes you or just because she’s drunk.

“I’m okay,” you tell her. “But it seems like you’ve been having fun.”

She grins, holding up a pair of shoes that definitely do not belong to her. “Absolutely. I make it a goal to fuck shit up whenever I’m at a bar.”

“Why?”

Then Lup does something amazing: she throws her head back and laughs, her long hair cascading down her shoulders, her collarbone bared. She’s wearing this little red dress that’s just outstanding on her, it sets her silhouette on fire. The sight of her laughing in that dress sets something off in you. It’s quiet, it’s small--like the lid was popped off a container, or a door was opened.

“What a dumb question,” she says after she stops laughing. “Why wouldn’t you fuck shit up?”

You feel yourself going red, and she looks discomfited for a moment. “But then,” she adds, “you don’t really seem like that type. Which is totally chill. The quiet ones can be the most badass of all when it counts.”

You find yourself stammering something that you certainly did not intend to say aloud, something more than thank you. Over the noise of the crowd it gets lost, and there’s something buzzing in your head, so after a minute you have absolutely no idea what you just said. Lup doesn’t seem to notice. She’s standing over you, still smiling, and even though she stinks of vodka and her footing is unsteady there’s something sharp in her gaze, something that cuts through you. She looks so completely relaxed and comfortable you can’t help but feel at ease with her next to you.

“You know,” she drawls, a lazy delight in her voice, “I know we, like, just met and all, but you’re a babe, Lu.”

Your face is on fire immediately. She’s grinning from ear to ear, as if you couldn’t have responded better.

“You said it would get confusing if people called me that,” you say, to avoid saying anything else.

“No, I changed my mind. It’s cute.” And before you can do anything, she leans down and kisses you on the cheek, brief and warm and a complete shock. You can feel a little bit of her lipstick rub off on your skin. “It suits you.”

Then she waltzes off into the crowd to join Taako without another word. You spend the rest of the night furiously not thinking about that exchange and observing everyone but Lup. You get to bed very late and don’t get the chance to wash your face, and then your alarm doesn’t go off the next morning, all of which is to say, when you end up on the deck of the Starblaster the morning that your crew takes off, you still have a little of Lup’s lipstick on your face.

Which means that every time you all regenerate at the beginning of a new cycle, for a hundred years, you have Lup’s lipstick on your face. Every time. It’s insane. It drives you up the wall. Takes you completely by surprise the first time, of course. 

After year 1 on the animal kingdom, after you realize that your home and everyone on it, your family, everyone you ever knew and loved has disappeared completely without a trace and you have absolutely no idea how to get them back, and the only thing that remains of your home now is the seven of you and the Starblaster--well, it takes you a little while to stop spending every night in your room hyperventilating.

You try to approach things as a researcher, a storyteller, compiling information for an epic that would span worlds and times, but you feel so small, and alone, and unimportant. You observe from the background. You watch as Magnus trains with the power bear. You watch in cycle 2 as Taako--on some ludicrous dare of Magnus’--eats some sort of green, slimy tuber that he found in the awful, overgrown forest the Starblaster landed in. He hallucinates for three hours afterwards and is completely useless in their mission to scout out the new planet. You spend cycle 2 watching Lup from a distance, watching as she plans and searches for the Light of Creation, as she researches your surroundings, as she jokes with her brother and discusses her scientific observations with Barry, as she plucks out songs for you all on her makeshift ukulele (God knows where she even found that thing), as she chases Magnus down the hallway with a spider. You watch her, and chronicle her, the way her hands twitch when she’s trying to think of the right words, the way her laugh curls its way up her spine and bubbles out of her, with physical force, the way her hair falls over her shoulders. You don’t say much. Once you overhear Davenport describe you as “shy but bright.” You try to find warmth in that.

By cycle 4, when you regenerate you know exactly where the lipstick will be and the fastest way to get it off. At the very end of cycle 8, the seven of you make a very close escape, and Lup makes a passionate speech about the hunger and the stakes of your mission. You clench your hands together, overwhelmed with the urge to grab her hand. You smile at her, wishing you knew how to say aloud the things you wrote, wishing that you didn’t always choke on your words when it mattered, wishing you could communicate the powerful and frightening feeling bubbling up in your stomach. 

In Cycle 11, the seven of you end up on this bizarre, dim planet with deep black oceans and perpetually charcoal-gray skies, due to some horrible pollutant produced by a sort of volcanic peak that hangs over the middle of the northern hemisphere. It contaminates the whole world, making it liveable, but sunless and miserable, and very difficult to breathe in. There are a good amount of people, living civilized but ill-governed and often violent lives. There are also several port cities where bandits run wild, and pirates often attack the inns set up on the water. After several months on this planet you all grow to understand that towns by the ocean are especially vulnerable to these types of attacks, making them particularly seedy--meaning that the taverns in these towns serve extremely strong alcohol.

It’s been over ten years, the seven of you traveling together, and you admire every single thing Lup does. She’s so self-assured, so brilliant, so powerful. She’s  _ funny, _ and spontaneous, and hates being told what to do. She never gets up before nine, and she will never laugh at a joke she doesn’t find funny. Her hair is soft and perpetually smells like fruit. Her ears twitch when she’s alert, or fighting, and her hands are nearly as quick as yours.

You can’t say anything to her. You don’t. This journey is taxing enough. It gets terribly depressing. You do your best to approach it as a researcher but still, the fear, and the panic, and the monotony, and the change--everything about it is so bizarre and so hard to take. God, the anxiety.

Which is why, once you discover these taverns, you don’t say no to a night of heavy drinking with Magnus, Taako and Lup. You’re three hours in and wobbly when you stand, and Magnus and Taako have disappeared because they got into a drinking contest with some pirate who had a bunch of face piercings. Lup is perched beside you on a barstool, laughing at something you did with a cherry stem, and she’s wearing something dull and unflattering but she looks like she could knock someone out with a look anyway because that’s just how Lup is. She is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and the only thing you want in the world is for her to be happy.

As you have that thought, in your intoxication you topple forward with the force of it, your desire for her joy, and suddenly your hands are on her waist and your face is on fire, and for a split second her eyes go wide, full of understanding. Then she raises her eyebrows as if to say “oh really?” and grabs you by the elbow, leading you away into a corner somewhere, where she presses you against the wall and presses her lips to yours. She’s solid and warm and she bites your lip and you moan into her mouth, your hands in her hair. Her fingers are skating down your shoulders, unbuttoning your shirt.

“God, Lup,” you whine as she palms your breasts, pressing sweet kisses to your neck, and you feel the curve of her waist and push up the hem of her shirt. You actually have yet to die in any of the cycles so far, but you’re starting to think that finally having Lup pressed against you, her tongue inside your mouth and her hands skating over your skin with all the ease and confidence in the world, this might be what finally kills you.

And then Taako is yelling her name from across the bar and Lup pulls up short, as if she’s come back to her senses, and you can tell by the way she steadies herself against the wall that she won’t remember any of this tomorrow, that she has no idea what she’s doing right now. Your heart plummets through your shoes like a rock. She leans over, and with a very un-Lup-like awkwardness that’s almost unbearable, she plants a wobbly kiss on your neck and sashays away to join her brother. You watch for a moment, your stupid, inebriated brian catching up to the drawn-out scream coming from your heart. You collapse against the wall, knowing she can no longer see you, because why would she be paying attention to you. Your job is to watch and record, not to participate. You are unimportant, you are uninteresting. You are a spectator.

By cycle 15, you’re used to the constant dull ache in your chest that comes from being fundamentally  _ less than _ the one you love. Lup is wonderful, and if you told her she would never be cruel, but you don’t deserve her. She needs someone powerful and confident, like herself. 

In cycle 19, the seven of you end up on a particularly cruel planet--as far as you can tell, it’s completely uninhabited. There are only a few hours on sunlight every day, and the nights are marked by constant, vicious dust storms. By the third month on this world you have given up all hope of finding the light, and are forced to spend most of every day huddled inside the Starblaster, trying to ignore the screeching of the wind and the waves of dust slamming into the side of the ship. The worst thing about it is the boredom. You try everything to keep yourselves occupied--Barry and Davenport spend a lot of time absorbed in scientific research and planning. Taako, for some unfathomable reason, decides that he wants to spend a lot of this time playing chess with you. You beat him nearly every time, but he never runs out of sarcastic comments for when you say “checkmate.” His company isn’t entirely unpleasant, but the two of you are maybe the two most emotionally closed-off members of the crew, and so spending a lot of one on one time together means a lot of heavy silences. Even though it’s been nearly twenty years by this point, and the seven of you are family, you’re still a little intimidated by Taako, his cold aloofness, his  _ yeah-whatever. _ One time you’re playing with him, and you’re like three moves away from taking his queen when Lup pokes her head in and says “Hey bud, come help me make dinner in a few.” Taako nods distractedly, and Lup shoots you a warm grin before she ducks out. Your heart clenches like it’s been put in an iron vice.

“Why don’t you say something to her?” Taako says, and you stop breathing for a second.

“What?”

He shakes his head. “For such a smart person, you really are an idiot sometimes.”

You flush. “For a dumb person, you can be smart every once in a while.”

Taako grins wryly, and then does something else that takes you by surprise: “Checkmate.”

In the eighth month of this cycle, you’ve had enough. You have a constant headache from the noise of the perpetual dust storms, and you’re sick of it being dark all the time. You can’t breathe here; you can’t stand it. You stand up on your desk chair with a rope, prepared to tie it around the pipe that hangs down in your chamber. You’ve died once or twice by now, and you’re not looking forward to doing it again, but the knowledge that you can just wake up next cycle and not have to deal with this anymore--it’s very liberating.

You wrap the cord around your neck.

“Hey, what the  _ fuck _ , man?”

The sound of her voice startles you so much that you fall off the chair, which means now you’re dangling from the pipe. You hear her let out a strangled noise of surprise and alarm and for a moment you hang there, suspended, watching the panic in her eyes for a half second before she regains her senses and shoots out some spell that severs the rope immediately, sending you crashing to the ground.

“Ow,” you mutter, rubbing your throat. 

“If you think that hurt, just wait til I get my hands on you,” says Lup, fire in her eyes and acid in her voice. She’s standing over you, hands on her hips, and you’re not  _ scared _ of her, exactly, but you feel small and meek and terrible. “What the fuck are doing, Lu?”

You sigh. “You weren’t supposed to--nobody was supposed to know before I did it. I just--I’m just so sick of this cycle, Lup, and--”

“We’re all sick of it, you asshole!” she yells. “We’re all fed up with this stupid planet, but this is what we have for right now. We are in this  _ together _ , and you are not allowed to just duck out. There are only seven of us, and it’s too important for us to keep going for you to--to--God, Lucretia!”

You start to mumble something along the lines of an apology, but you’re stopped short by the way Lup sits down and puts her head in her hands. In nearly two decades of traveling with her you’ve rarely seen her look so weary.

“You can’t do shit like this. You’re too important. We need you,” Lup says quietly after a long moment. You find yourself quite unable to speak, unable to do anything, really, besides let hot tears pour down your cheeks and watch Lup pinch the bridge of her nose. She kneels beside you, her eyes tired but kind, and puts a hand on your shoulder.

“It’s okay,” she says, forcing out a sad smile. “Just don’t try it again, alright?”

You nod. You’d do anything for her. You’d jump off a cliff.

“I know it sucks. But that’s the good part.  _ I know. _ We all do. Whatever you’re feeling, the upside of this batshit crazy trip is that you don’t have to go through it alone.”

She puts her thumb on your cheek, wiping away a tear. “Whatever happens, we’re family. And you can always just say something instead of doing something stupid. Okay?”

You meet her gaze, and feel your heart swelling so dramatically you feel like it might pop. “Okay.”

  
  



End file.
